Search form

Opinions

The Royal Tour documentary by PBS’s Peter Greenberg that features President Paul Kagame as an amiable and knowledgeable tour guide is arguably the best thing that Rwandans and friends of Rwanda may have watched in the recent past. The trailer to the documentary had nearly everyone so anxious...

Kigali’s hospitality industry has been very busy this year. One international meeting after another have been alternating, a true indication that the country’s vision to become a conference hub is right on cue.
The latest has been the just-concluded Mo Ibrahim Foundation Governance...

For the longest time, businesses were primarily about profits and little else. Naturally, profit was the best indicator that the business was on the right track.
Once in a while, however, the business went out to the community to engage in some social ‘good’, what has come to be known...

“It behoves us and the partnerships we can muster to “contribute to a future which is fairer, more sustainable, more secure and more prosperous.”
Those words formed part of the preamble to the Communiqué at the close of this year’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (...

Last evening, the much-awaited documentary, “Rwanda: The Royal Tour”, was aired by the national television.
President Paul Kagame gave producer Peter Greenberg a personal guided tour to all corners of the country, showing off what this country has to offer. From the diversity of its...

HONG KONG – As the risk of a US-China trade war mounts, creating a geopolitically neutral and fair monetary system has become increasingly urgent. The shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world order has not been particularly orderly. Instead, it has produced a kind of monetary non-system...

NEW YORK – With economic conditions returning more or less to normal around the world after a decade of financial crises, nationalist populism is now seen as the biggest threat to global recovery. That was certainly true of the finance ministers who gathered in Washington, DC, this month for...

As the sun sets on the 2018 Commonwealth summit, momentum for Africa is heating up in more ways than one. News that Rwanda will host the next Commonwealth summit in 2020 has been greeted with much enthusiasm in the UK.
Rightly so. Rwanda is not only an example of African success and...

A visit to the Campaign Against Genocide (CAG) Museum in Kigali is a plunge into the scary hole of the near-impossibility of recreating a genocidal Rwanda into the new country we see today!
That the museum is in the basement of the Parliamentary building doesn’t help matters.
The terror of...

NEW YORK – In 2015, United Nations member states came together and committed to achieving a comprehensive and universal set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) spanning all dimensions of economic and social development.
Investment will be indispensable to achieving the SDGs, which aim...

A few months ago, a local Christian radio station, Amazing Grace, aired a controversial sermon that attracted a flurry of condemnations, especially among women.
It particularly targeted women, saying that they were the source of all evil and many other demeaning labels of incitement.
Rwanda Media...

For much of our history, the black community has used real estate as the primary tool of investment for wealth creation. Many of us grew up watching our parents buy properties which they rented for income and later sold to create a retirement nest egg or kept to leave as an inheritance.
This has...

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA – US President Donald Trump has declared that America’s $500 billion trade deficit with China means that the US is “down” $500 billion. Apparently, he thinks that trade surpluses and deficits amount to profit and loss statements for countries. He could...

STANFORD – Technology and the largest tech firms are becoming increasingly controversial. Today, there are growing concerns about third parties accessing and manipulating Facebook user data; and before that, there was a raging debate about whether the government should be able to unlock...

‘You can fool some people sometime, but you can’t fool all the people all the time’ –Bob Marley, Get up, stand up!
In the early 1950s, following the wave of independence in Africa and South America, former colonial powers wanted to ensure that their multinationals would...

BASEL – Ending an epidemic is a marathon undertaking, and in the case of malaria, we are nearing the finish line. But we will need to keep up the momentum.
Over the past few decades, governments, nongovernmental organisations, and the private sector have broken new ground in the science of...

Hardly a week had passed after the official mourning period for victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, than four mass graves of more victims were discovered on the outskirts of the city.
As we go to press, the first grave has just been excavated and 207 bodies exhumed and more are...

African politicians and intellectuals used to talk passionately about pan-Africanism. You hardly hear the word now, except among a small group dedicated to keep it alive.
That, of course, does not mean that the idea is dead. Far from it. It is actually alive and well and flourishing in Rwanda. You...

Rwanda Education Board (REB) seems to have learnt its lessons the hard way, but it was a necessary learning curve.
Its top leadership was recently shaken up following a school textbook saga and confusion; foreign printers were contracted, who in turn subcontracted local firms who failed miserably...

BRUSSELS – Since the Great Recession of 2007-2009, most economists have begun to regard finance as a key driver of the business cycle. But the precise dynamics are not yet fully understood.
For example, the University of Chicago’s Amir Sufi and Princeton’s Atif Mian argue that...